Well, it’s my final week in Albuquerque and I will admit that it is a bittersweet feeling.  I have had a great time being in the southwest for the summer, and I ended up enjoying working in the lab a lot more that I thought I would.  At the same time though, everyone else on the Lawrence cross country team reported to campus yesterday and will be spending the majority of the week up at Bjorklunden, while I will not be able to join them until next week.

This past week we have been able to collect blood samples from people as part of the study to determine genetic variation in healthy human donors.  On top of the work involved with this, I have been finishing up a few other sets of experiments and have put everything together for a presentation this afternoon.  Making a PowerPoint with everything that I have worked on this summer has made me realize how much I truly had the opportunity to be a part of.

I honestly don’t know what to write about right now, as I haven’t really been doing anything new in lab recently.  I guess I will include a few pictures of some Immunohistochemistry staining that I worked on last week.  Both are from slides made of the bone marrow of the mice that I was able to dissect recently.  While both mice were engrafted with leukemia, the first picture (bluish) is of the mouse that was treated with the antibody that I have been working with while the second picture (brown) is from an untreated mouse.  Without going into too much detail, the brown parts are that color because they are specific leukemia cells.

It is kind of cool to see how the treatment that I have been working with here makes a definite impact on a cancerous disease.  While it doesn’t show a full cure, there is undoubtedly progress made and it is encouraging for future tests.

Thanks again for reading!

Sam Stevens (‘13)